Gartner recommends IT develops real-time system administration

Businesses will need to rethink their datacentre scaling within two years to support the demands of web-scale computing.

Traditional datacentre architectures cannot cope with the massive peaks indemand that can arise on the web.

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Companies such as Amazon and NetFlixhave needed to develop custom system management tools to support scalability in their respective applications and online services.

Gartner predicts that by 2017, 25% of organisations will use “demand shaping” – in which demand is influenced to match supply – so the IT department can offer capacity planning and management for web-scale business opportunities.

Ian Head, research director at Gartner, said: "The different architectures and the huge scope of web-scale IT organisations make traditional, highly focused tools limited in use. Demand shaping requires more and different functionality than current off-the-shelf tools provide."

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In the Gartner paper Capacity and performance management form the basis of web-scale IT, Head explained how such tools could work. He said: “In-memory computing and deep analytics tools are used to extract the required information from a combination of the infrastructure monitoring tools and the instrumentation built into the applications. The resulting analytical information is used to facilitate proactive, real-time and near-real-time actions to allocate resources and manage potential bottlenecks.”

Gartner predicted that major organisations will need to maintain and sustain their conventional capacity-planning skills and tools, while they develop management skills for web-scale IT.

Head said: "By 2016, the availability of capacity and performance management skills for horizontally scaled architectures will be a major constraint or risk to growth for 80% of major businesses. To take advantage of web-scale IT approaches to capacity and performance management, IT architects need to fully embrace stateless application architectures and horizontally scaling infrastructure architectures."